Investigating Attitudes towards Standard Mandarin and Ningbo-Accented Mandarin: A Verbal Guise Test Study

Attitude, an evaluative judgment of an object, is a fundamental concept in social science. In sociolinguistics, the study of language attitudes has gained popularity, particularly after Labov's experiment on New Yorkers' attitudes towards rhoticity. Verbal Guise Test (VGT), a variant of Matched Guise Test (MGT), has become an effective method widely used in these language experiments.

With a wide variety of dialects coexisting with Standard Mandarin (SM) and diglossia being a common phenomenon, China is a suitable place for attitudinal experiments on languages. For instance, Ningbo, a city of nearly 10 million people in Zhejiang province, often uses Ningbo dialect, which is distinctive from Mandarin and influences the native's pronunciation of Mandarin, leading to the emergence of Ningbo-accented Mandarin (NAM).

This research seeks to employ VGT to investigate whether university students have different attitudes towards SM and NAM and the possible reasons for this difference.